If You Don’t Look Like Obama’s Son, No One Cares

The news story is horrifying: after a trivial encounter with a group of youths who were playing basketball, a man in Mobile, Alabama, was set upon by a gang of twenty men armed with brass knuckles, chairs, pipes and paint cans. The victim, Matthew Owens, was attacked on his own front porch and beaten within an inch of his life. He is in critical condition and may die:

As the gang walked away after assaulting Owens, one of them said, “Now that’s justice for Trayvon.” Jim Treacher comments:

Hey, that’s what he gets for having a similar skin color to someone we’ve all been instructed to hate.

Well done, Spike Lee. Nice job, NBC. Keep up the good work, ABC. And to everyone else who’s been using a shooting in Florida to foment hate and divide people by the color of their skin, kudos. Don’t let this attack, and similar attacks across America, bother you. If you had a conscience, we never would’ve heard of you in the first place.

Well, it won’t bother them; we know that. It certainly won’t bother Barack Obama. Matthew Owens doesn’t look like his son, and there are no votes to be had. For Obama, if it doesn’t help his re-election campaign, it doesn’t exist. Whether he likes it or not, however, I think incidents like this one, which have multiplied all across America, will hurt Obama in the fall. Millions of Americans voted for Obama in part because they thought his election would put racial division to rest, or at least contribute to that goal. But the opposite has happened. Obama has been an extraordinarily divisive president; neither he nor others in his administration, like Eric Holder, have ever hesitated to foment race hatred when they thought it would serve the Democrats’ political interests. As it turned out, Obama’s election represented a setback for race relations in the United States, an outcome that virtually no one foresaw. This is just one way–but perhaps an important one–in which voters are disillusioned with Obama.